As we built this course, we worked to provide teachers with experiences that would help them learn about and refine their teaching. These experiences are designed to build on the substantial amount of experience and expertise teachers already bring to their profession.

Our overall goal is that at the end of the course, you should be able to begin to implement the process standards in your work, thereby improving your teaching and student learning. We hope that this course expands the range of pedagogical tools and worthwhile educational experiences you can provide for your students. Finally, we hope this course provides a framework by which you can continue to improve as a teacher, long after you have finished this particular course of study. All five of these standards are inexhaustible. Continued study of them will be rewarding throughout a teacher's career.

Now we will outline how each session of the course is structured and how to work through the content.

To start, there are five sessions, one for each standard, as outlined above. Within each session there are five parts, each with a specific goal. These parts are Observe, Explore, Define, Apply, and Evaluate. Here is an explanation of each one.

  The Observe Part